This invention is directed to a technique which monitors the advertisements and promotions to which consumers selected as test subjects are exposed as well as the subsequent purchases made by those consumers and, in particular, to an improved technique for collecting more data than has previously been feasible, and to correlate the purchases with the advertising and promotions.
Expenditures on advertising (e.g. television commercials) and promotion (e.g. coupons) of consumer products in the U.S. exceeded $110 billion for the year 1990. Advertisers who spend such huge sums of money understandably want to determine whether the money is being well spent and, if not, how improvements can be made.
Factors which affect the cost of an advertising and/or promotion campaign include (1) the extent of geographic coverage, (2) the advertising medium (e.g. print, radio, television), (3) how many advertising media are used, (4) frequency of use for the advertisement and/or promotion, (5) the time slot, and (6) the time duration of the campaign. When an advertising campaign is launched, these factors are decided upon based on various considerations of importance to a particular advertiser and which need not be delved into here. However, with the initial decisions having been made, the advertiser must have feedback to assess whether the campaign is working. A change in total sales is not enough because that could be happening regardless of, or perhaps even in spite of, the campaign rather than because of it. What the advertiser must know is (a) was a targeted portion of the public exposed to the campaign as planned, and (b) did the consumers who were exposed to the campaign purchase the product or services covered by it.
Various techniques are currently available to provide information of this nature. However, each of these suffers from various drawbacks. The first, and most primitive, involves an interview conducted by phone or, for example, at a shopping center. During such interview the consumer is asked to recall exposure to a particular advertisement and to disclose the subsequent purchases that were made. Results obtained with this technique are suspect because of the heavy reliance on memory, and a person's inclination to be biased, perhaps even subconsciously, in favor of what is of interest to the interviewer which then tends to color the consumer's responses to the interviewer's questions.
A second known approach involves recording the television programming, including commercials of course, watched in a particular household. This information is stored in an electronic memory. Consumer purchase behavior is recorded by the use of a bar code reading apparatus, such as a wand, which is passed over each purchased product when it is brought home. Information available with this technique is of limited value because it is usable only with products bearing a bar code. A great number of products are not sold with a bar code, such as gasoline, pharmaceuticals, major appliances, clothing and unpackaged food items. Moreover, the purchase of services, such as is provided by airlines, movie houses and theaters, certainly cannot be monitored. Also, a great deal of effort by the consumer is required to scan each and every purchased item individually. Since the scanning must be done when the consumer returns home and before the purchases are stored away, the person is already tired and/or eager to get started on other tasks and, therefore, may not perform the scanning. Such failure to carry out the recording of purchases part of this monitoring approach is even more likely for perishable items such as ice cream which need to be refrigerated or kept frozen almost immediately upon the consumer's return home. Consequently, consumer cooperation with this technique is also suspect in addition to being of limited value due to total reliance on only bar-coded items.
A third technique involves a particular store that has been equipped with special computer equipment to identify certain consumers and to record their purchases. Identification of the consumer is accomplished with a card given to the consumer and on which a unique code has been recorded. When the consumer arrives at the cash register, the card is handed to the cashier who uses it to enter the code. As the purchases are "rung-up" on the cash register, they are also recorded as having been made by the consumer whose identity is established by the code on the card. This purchasing behavior is stored in the special computer, and the information is periodically downloaded to a computing center. That computing center also receives information on the television commercials to which the same consumer was exposed, and collected in the same way as described above for the second technique. No media other than television are provided for. Thus, it is possible to correlate the purchases made with television commercials. However, this approach requires installation of relatively expensive computer equipment in a store, and only a very few stores can, therefore, be involved in the monitoring effort. Consequently, purchases made elsewhere by the consumer go unrecorded. As a result, the amount of information collected may provide less than a meaningful sample.
In addition to the necessity for the advertiser to have the above-discussed advertising and purchase information, it is also valuable to collect, store and analyze related information as well. For example, many products are sold with promotions such as coupons, special sizes, product combination, sale price, etc. With such information, the advertiser can determine whether the product was likely to have been sold due to the advertisement or due to the promotion, or perhaps due to both. None of the above-described techniques is capable of collecting and storing such information. The terms "advertisement" and "advertising" when used hereinafter should also be understood in context as referring to promotions as well as radio, television and print advertising.
Consumers have been given rewards as a part of known monitoring techniques to improve the likelihood of obtaining an acceptable degree of cooperation from the consumer. Although the consumers who have been selected as test subjects may intend to cooperate, many things compete for time and attention with what the consumer is asked to do so that purchasing behavior can be monitored. Consequently, despite all the best intentions, the level of cooperation is likely to drop. Rewards are designed to counter this. With the second known technique discussed above, for example, once all the information on a consumer's advertising monitoring and purchase behavior has been processed by computer, certain rewards will be sent by mail. However, this can take several weeks due to the magnitude of data that must be processed. The impact of the reward diminishes with the amount of time which elapses from the doing of the reward earning activity until the reward is received. Thus, it would be helpful to speed up the process considerably. Also, the value of the reward to the consumer could be enhanced if it were targeted better. The targeting involves customizing the reward to the purchases that are made and/or the consumer who makes them. For example, if the consumer buys clothing, then the reward could be a dry-cleaning coupon. Likewise, if the particular consumer is a female, the coupon might be for a suitable accessory to the clothing, such as a scarf, perhaps even in the same store as the one where the clothing was purchased. The possibilities are endless. However, the prior art has not provided any way for speeding up the process of providing the reward and targeting the reward in order to gain the very considerable benefit of obtaining increased consumer cooperation.
One further shortcoming of the prior art is the inability to monitor whether direct mail advertising has been read or simply discarded. Direct mail constitutes about 20% of all advertising in terms of outlay. It would be highly useful for advertisers to know whether and how the consumer's purchasing behavior is affected by direct mail advertising.
The term "exposed" when it appears throughout this specification is used in the sense of locating the consumer who is a participant in the test in such close proximity to the advertisement that the probability of the advertisement having a mental impact is high. This requires that, for example, a radio advertisement monitoring system provide not only information about when the advertisement was broadcast or even that the consumer was in the same house as the radio set when the commercial was broadcast, but that the consumer was within a relatively small distance of the radio set at that time. The same relatively stringent requirements are applied to television commercial monitoring and print ad monitoring before it can be said that the consumer has been "exposed" to it.